Opis: reliable distributed systems in OCaml

The importance of distributed systems is growing as computing devices become ubiquitous and bandwidth becomes plentiful. Concurrency and distribution pose algorithmic and implementation challenges in developing reliable distributed systems, making the field an excellent testbed for evaluating programming language and verification paradigms. Recently, several specialized domain-specific languages and extensions of memory-unsafe languages have been proposed to aid distributed system development. In this paper we propose an alternative to these approaches, arguing that modern, higher-order, strongly typed, memory safe languages provide an excellent vehicle for developing and debugging distributed systems. We present Opis, a functional-reactive approach for developing distributed systems in Objective Caml. In Opis, a protocol description consists of a reactive function (called event function) describing the behavior of a distributed system node. The event functions in Opis are built fr...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: TLDI
• Authors: Pierre-Évariste Dagand, Dejan Kostic, Viktor Kuncak
• Keywords: Chord Distributed Hash, Composable Protocol Descriptions, Formal Methods, Reliable Distributed Systems, TLDI 2009